Fat Buoy Swim

So this is the final product of the group sea project, which we named Fat Buoy Swim

For this group project, we initially decided upon somewhat of a democracy in terms of roles in which each would play. It was apparent early on that myself, Jordan and Harry all have very similar interests in terms of what we wanted our jobs to be within the project. However this wasn't a problem, as we all quickly agreed that we would aim to do a 2D piece for the 1 minute and 5 seconds of animation. 

Having decided on the basic method in which we planned to animate, our next goal was to achieve a common sense of style, that we could all work towards. We knew that if we did something hand drawn, that we would all have not only be able to draw in the same style, but enjoy what we were drawing. Throughout our research, we came across a style of traditional Chinese ink art, which was loose, and very basic in terms of colour. It was agreed that we would want to work to a loose style, as it is somewhat easier and faster to animate, which was very important for the success of our animation as we had the smallest group, and the longest sound file to work with.

I feel it is also very important to note that we agreed early on that having such a short piece of animation, that we would find it hard to have the audience relate emotionally to any of the characters, so we decided to create a very humorous piece rather than a very serious one. For me, I think this is where myself, and possibly the others hugely benefited, as it was much more enjoyable finding playful ways of injecting as much humor possibly to every aspect of the animation, rather than trying to make a short piece incredibly sad or striking. It enabled us to have a lot of fun while we animated, constantly adding ideas as we were going, even in the later stages of animating and compositing. We also included music to the scene to help generate laughter, which I think only appeals to a certain younger age group, such as our peers. 

Overall Im extremely pleased with the way we ended the production and the final result. Although we started slow, I feel we finished with an absolute bang, working 15 hour days for the last few weeks made up for lost time, as we were able to finish everything. Im very pleased with how it turned out, even if it only seems to appeal to the younger audience. Our team all worked really well together by the end, and I feel as though we have all learned a great deal. 

Drawing of Life

A selection of life drawing from my first and second semester. I feel I have definitely improved my life drawing skills after my first year (not that I have anything on this blog to compare it to), and although there is a long way to go, I am starting to see how to effectively show weight and emotion, as well as attempting to drawing faster, which requires me to be much looser than what I am used to. 

(encase your wondering why there are some really weird ones in there, some of them are exaggerated life drawings!)

Sea Project, Progress

Despite the deadline fast approaching for this project, the group is making seemingly good progress on 'Fat Buoy Swim' (which is what we have decided to call our 1 minute short!). We always knew that when it came down to it, myself, Harry and Jordan are fast animators when using flash. We have had a couple of snags along the way, but with only 4 days left of animating we have done the bulk of the main animations, with only one or two shots left that need some major tweaks, and one or two more with some minor changes. So all in all, you could say its going swimmingly (I'm awful). In all seriousness however, we are yet to implement any backgrounds, and will need to composite the all the shots and add camera moves in Toonboom.

Here is a quick sneaky peek at me animating some of the waves, in its crudest form (i.e without any texture or colour ect)

Dark Cave, Background Project.

For the second painting, the idea was to create one main light, with an added secondary light. My first intention was to do the inside of the pirate ship, but didnt like anything I drew up.

My second idea was to create a smugglers cave-type scenario. Similar to the first painting I wanted to make it dark, and gloomy. Starting with a black canvas, I went about just adding light to create features and shadows, and not actually drawing much detail at all. Im not very happy with the end product, I struggled to get the right colour light coming from the lamp, and I think the over all look of the final product is just plain weird. If I have time, I plan to do another.

Finished (very weird) Piece. 

Pirates Ship (yarr) Background project

The first of three drawings, based on the pirates animatic I created last semester. These drawings are. or would be, background for the animation. This particular exterior shot was done using a 'complementary colour scheme', which has one, directional light (the sun). I decided to go for a dark green, gloomy feel, as I thought it might suit the whole pirate theme. 

Below Ive screen shotted some of the stages I went through to get to the end result.

For the first background I've done in colour, Im pretty happy with it. the hardest part was getting the perspective of the ship down, which proved tricky. I feel as though I got the silhouette of the ship pretty well done in the end though however.

Original Drawing 

First things first; Background/Lighting.

Adding in the basic texture of the ship, and shading.

Flipping an Image is an age-old technique to get a new perspective of your painting, to highlight mistakes you may otherwise miss.

Finished Piece. 

Falmouth Animation Ident

 As I had decided I wanted a very 2D, hand drawn feel to this Ident, I of course decided to do hand drawn cell animation. I really wanted it to show that the course does have a drawn, 2d aspect to it, and its not just 3D and maya. This project took a fair amount of planning because of this, getting all the timing right, and making sure nothing moved around too much.

I decided to use a classic animated 'pose' character to be waving around in his circle, as I felt this was simply enough to describe the studies of motion within animation. I didn't want the animation to be too long, just quick and snappy, so I roughly set a marker of 70-80 frames. (All at 25fps)

After drawing all the hand drawn aspects, including the word 'Animation', I threw them into aftereffects, as I have alittle knowledge of how the programme works and felt confident I could create some sort of 'projector', which would create the illusion of that a old projector was creating the image. Adding sound effects also helped this. 

Overall I am reasonably pleased with the outcome. I feel the animation could be alittle smoother, and would love it if I was allowed to make it slighter longer, but I feel I reached my goal of portraying the 2D side of the  course.

Mudbox, The devils in the Detail

The next step was to create a real 3D environment object, using photos, in Maya, and Mudbox.

To start out I ventured out to an old boat yard, to find something I found interested to photograph, and eventually model in Maya. This most interesting thing I found there was an old plastic oil canister. It had lots of interesting marks and texture and so I photographed it from all sides and Headed back to Model. However, I did not anticipate at the time how hard it would be to model this object In maya, and eventually decided to make something simpler.

The next object I came across that I thought would work well was a small wooden crate. I liked this object as it was made out of mango wood, and it had a very interesting grain. After taking pictures, I cropped them in Photoshop, and started modelling in Maya.

Being that this was quite a simple object, I was done quite fast, and began projecting the image in Mudbox, and started to refine the edges, and engrave in between the slats of wood, as well as protruding the box out where the handles are. 

Once I had worked out how to go about this project, I found myself getting very involved and actually really enjoying it. Creating an object from real life in 3D is actually very gratifying! The crate looks very similar to the real object, and I am pleased with the texturing I added afterwards. The only thing I would do to make this abit prettier is to add different lighting, and to sharpen the edges of the create.

Projection Mapping Maya

Moving on from the adaptation project, which used photoshop layered files in Toon Boom, I have now places those files into Maya to accomplish what is called a projection map. The idea is to create roughly the same shot as I made in Toon Boom, but in Maya, creating an actual 3D effect. 

As I'm more of a 2D player than 3D, naturally I found this harder, however I was reasonably happy with the end result. Put simply, I had to import the layers of the photoshop file I had made earlier (below) layer by layer, onto individual planes, connect it to a projection camera, and sculpt the 2D image planes one by one to give an illusion of 3D with a basic camera move.

In doing this, I found that multiple layers were moved slightly in the process (by accident) and it slightly altered the overall image. I also made a few other mistakes, such as sculpting some of the layers too much, which brakes the illusion of 3D as the camera moves. You can see this in the final render below.

Ident Test

For the Falmouth Animation Ident project, I wanted to create something that looked fun and appealling to 2D creatives. Many falmouth idents I have seen before are mostly 3D things, alot of flashy maya and after effects work. I my ident to have a very hand-drawn feel. So far I have come up with this as a test, drawing the falmouth logo into a boil over a black piece of brown paper. It took longer than expected, but I think that was because I didn't have the right equipment to take photos with. 

Some concept art tests

Just a few random tests drawing on photoshop, no rhyme or reason other than trying to get some more lighting down. 

Both drawings took about 15-25 minutes.

Backgrounds Proj Concept Pieces

After purchasing my Wacom Bamboo tablet, I've really enjoyed playing around with it, and developing my overall drawing skills in photoshop and Flash. Its a great piece of kit, and a must for any animator! For the our drawing module, we have to create some backgrounds which would work as animation background layers. 

Here is just one that I was playing around with, which was inspired by the concept artist Noah Bradley.  For this drawing I really wanted to just focus on getting lighting correct. Noah Bradley is incredible at hitting the correct lighting in the overall image, and that is what i aimed to accomplish. Unfortunately I was unable to finish this Image as I started it, and forgot about it, and when I returned to finish it I had lost the initial connection with the drawing, so decided to leave it.

Adaptation Piece

Adaptation of comics, books, games and artwork has been a popular source of inspiration for me and many animators alike, so when we were asked to create a very quick and simply 'test shot' in Toonboom animation software,  I was quite pleased.

For this I decided to use a game that I had been playing recently, Borderlands 2. Borderlands has a very unike art style for an open xbox game. It uses cell shading, it quite a graphic and comic way, and I had always really liked the way it looked. I decided to select a Ice scene from Borderlands 2, add a hut and some smoke and see what I could do. This is an image from the game that I had used.

This is the photoshop image that I created, using Borderlands art style as a rough guideline. I attempted to make everything stand out with block graphic outlines, and using the same colour palate.

And here is the final test shot. Although its short, I am reasonably pleased with this, and definitely feel more confident about using Toonboom, which is certainly a good thing! I managed to include the clouds moving, the smoke rising and the camera move. I may have animated the clouds and smoke moving a little to hastily, however I think I can get away with it for a test shot! 

Female 'Flirty' Walk Cycles.

In general I much prefer drawing women, I find it a lot easier to draw curves than blocks, and it feels much more naturual to draw the female figure. However when it comes to animating I have found that my rule does not apply. Im not sure yet why this is so, I just seem to find animating Male character much, much easier. Maybe its because, being a male myself, I know the ins and outs of a Male's walk much better than females. Nevertheless, I have finally produced a female walk which I am at least slightly pleased with.

I started off this walk cycle with a very basic female form. To make this walk seem 'female' I knew I had to accentuate certain aspects, such as the bust and behind. I wanted to make the hips sway and the hair to flop carelessly about. After all its a 'flirty' walk! This was my first attempt at blocking out the key poses of the female walk. I included my basic reference character that I started off with. 

From that I learned that the basic movement of the bust and hair was correct, and I thought it worked well, in a very comical way. I did not, however, like how the legs moved, or the arms really. The dress actually made the process harder for me to aniamte the legs (even though I thought I could used it to hide them)

Next I cleared up the basic walk cycle. This time I focused on the legs a little more, make them a little clearer within the walk.

After this stage, and quite alot of time attempting to clean it up, I decided to bite the bullet and
and start again using a different angle, and different character. Here Ill show you how i focused on the legs first to make sure they were feminine enough

And finally I added the top half.

Working hard...

Or hardly working... 

Sea Test Group Animation

Quick Flash sea test for the group animation. Think we decided on this as a rough way of our sea moving, however there needs some changes, and for it to be alittle less detailed and more loose. 

This shot works well for a shore shot, with the sea lapping up at the sand. 

'Fat Kid' Character sheet.

When we first started out planning what characters would look like for the group sea project, our characters were pretty bland, obvious character types. I've personally found it very interesting how our design of the characters has progressed into our final design. We knew wanted to add humour to our film, and we also learnt that contrast helps add to humour, and seeing as we had two main characters in the short film, we decided to make them opposites of each other: a fat, round child, and  a strong, square man. 

Here I'm going to show a basic character sheet for our final 'fat kid'. It might not be the final design in terms of detail, but we are decided on the silhouette and general size of the character.